


The Enchanted Woods

by poppunkwolf



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Adventure, Children, Family, Fluff, Gen, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:50:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7496292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poppunkwolf/pseuds/poppunkwolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annalise and Celestine have always been competitive with each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Enchanted Woods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ImaginaryRA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImaginaryRA/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [ImaginaryRA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImaginaryRA/pseuds/ImaginaryRA) in the [AnnaliseAppreciation](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/AnnaliseAppreciation) collection. 



When Annalise found a lizard in her bed, it was so perfectly still, vibrantly green, and clammy looking that she knew with certainty that it was fake, a toy that Celestine had probably picked up at the dime store just for the coveted chance to scare her. “Thanks Cellie!” she called out, hoping Celestine would hear her across the hall from her bedroom. “I just found your toy so it’s mine now!” She picked the lizard up by the middle, at which point it jolted into frantic scrambles and she screamed, dropping the creature back onto her sheets.

“Haha! You fell for it!” Celestine emerged from behind her coats in the opened closet and pointed at her in a deliberately exaggerated jeer. She ran out of the room before Annalise could retaliate.

“Celestine come back here, I’m not playing with you!” Annalise shouted. “Now I have to wash lizard germs off my bed!”

She wished Celestine was not so literal about fighting dirty. Her last prank had involved putting swamp water in her perfume bottle, mixed in with the solution just enough that Annalise had sprayed it on her neck and in the crooks of each elbow before she noticed the earthy smell and the murky grime on her.

“That’s what you get for trying to be cute!” Cellie had said with a hand on her hip, when Annalise confronted her, but she was still a grubby nine year old and didn’t understand how important it was to be clean and fashionable and well-perfumed as a mature young lady about to enter middle school.

Annalise marched into Celestine’s room and pulled her by the ear back to her own room. “You’re gonna get this nasty lizard off my bed right now.”

Cellie fought her the whole way, but once in Annalise’s room, picked up the lizard and held it out to her. “Are you suuure you don’t wanna be its best friend?”

“Stop! Ugh,” Annalise protested. “Okay, you know what? You wanna be a lizard girl so bad? C’mon, let’s go. I’m gonna take you to the conservation and you get to crawl around with your true people all you want. Go downstairs and tell Theo to be ready in ten minutes. I’ll make us peanut butter and jelly.”

“Isn’t Daddy coming to get us today?” Cellie asked.

“Probably not,” Annalise couldn’t help but retort. “If he comes, oh well, we’ll just say we didn’t know he was really gonna show up.”

Celestine didn’t protest this, and why would she? Their father was mean and restrictive and not the person they wanted to spend their weekend with. They say sometimes you gotta just ask for forgiveness instead of permission. This was one of those situations.

 

The conservation area was a muddy, swampy, always-flooded forest. No one who had actually seen it would ever let three children go there alone. Naturally, then, it held so many adventures. Deep into the forest, against all odds, past the many fallen trunks and the shamrock green moss and the spider webs so thick you needed an umbrella to battle your way through them, was a clearing so beautiful they called it the enchanted woods, and someone had built two tree houses close together, each connected in the air by a wobbly rope hammock. The anonymous builder seemed to have left it there for anyone in general, and when the kids stole away to the woods, down the familiar off-path route, they were sure to tell no one of their charmed secret.

“I’m gonna collect wild mushrooms,” Theo had announced when they arrived at the clearing.

“No you’re not unless you wanna die,” Annalise said. “Don’t eat anything you find out here.”

“I’m not gonna eat them, I promise,” Theo said. “I’m just gonna collect them so I can bring them home and look them up in my book.”

“If I find you poisoned to death I’m not gonna drag your body all the way back home so I hope you like the idea of being cougar food,” Annalise called after him as a final warning.

“Let’s get in the hammock!” Cellie proposed, so they took the perilously high climb up to the tree house. The trunk had pieces of splintery forest branches nailed to it in a rudimentary ladder, so that a person could reasonably grip onto something as they climbed, but was still in honest danger of falling. Annalise let Celestine go first under the guise that she could catch her if she fell, even though she was aware that such a disaster would only take the both of them down.

Celestine successfully reached the entrance to the hut in the high branches, and crawled across the floor board to the other side, where the hammock was.

Annalise, behind her, said, “Careful,” and crawled closer to hold the hammock steady from inside the tree house while Cellie climbed onto it. Annalise followed, and they giggled tensely as they wobbled and clung for dear life. They settled laying side-by-side next to each other, looking up at the canopy of trees above them. Something told her that while she didn’t want to ruin the fun out of nowhere like somebody’s mama, she would not allow her baby sister to do this ever again. Being a mature older sister had begun to take different forms for her, and today it was in the sudden realization that they were unwisely flirting with death.

“It makes me want to be a tightrope walker,” Celestine said. “I could work in the circus, and wear a real groovy sequined dress like Diana Ross, and walk on the rope and be so good at balancing that I’ll be famous.”

“You don’t have to be a tightrope walker,” Annalise said, “You could work in the circus just based on your face.”

“Hey!” Celestine pushed her, and she screamed.

“Do not push me to my death, you psycho!” Annalise said, holding dearly to the hammock.

“But if I kill you I’ll be the oldest child,” Celestine responded, with feigned sincerity.

“Remind me to have you locked up in a straightjacket,” Annalise said. “And trust me, you don’t wanna be the oldest and have to go chasing after little brats all day.”

“I’m not a brat.”

“You think that cuz you’re so bad you don’t even know. You better be glad I didn’t pop you upside your head for that lizard foolishness. I can’t wait to go to college and get rid of y’all.”

“What you wanna go to college for?”

Annalise shrugged. “I wanna be a judge or a lawyer or something.”

“Why?”

“So I can help people and be rich and get respect.”

“Respect from who?”

“Everyone.”

Celestine made a “hmph” sound. “If I did something to help people, it would be nice to work at a hospital. But I rather do something fun. If I don’t work at the circus, I wanna be a singer or a model or something like that.”

“Or you could be a scientist and study nature, since you looooove to come out here looking for the grossest thing to come after me with. You could discover a new lizard.”

“I’ll name it after you,” Cellie promised, earning the most retaliatory elbow jabs Annalise could give without swaying the two of them dangerously.

“What if we did something together?” Cellie asked. “Like a family act?”

“We could be backup dancers for Prince!” Annalise exclaimed.

“Or we could start our own band,” Cellie suggested. “Theo could sing, since he’s the littlest, like Michael Jackson and his brothers. And then Daddy could be our manager and Mama could do our costumes.”

“Daddy couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag,” Annalise said.

“He’s probably mad and looking for us right now.”

“Let him look. I went next door and told Mrs. Harris where we were going. Mama and Daddy probably found out where we were and knew they couldn’t come look for us in these giant woods. But I’d like to see him try.”

“He’s not that bad,” Celestine said. “You just mad cuz if he comes and gets us you can’t go hang out at that dime store parking lot where those boys be at.”

“I don’t care about those boys,” Annalise said, mortified. “Don’t tell Mama what you just said.”

“Cuz you know she’d whoop you.”

“I didn’t even do anything!” Annalise protested, but she did like to go to the dime store parking lot and sit around with the other girls while they watched the boys freestyle and dance. There was a girl in particular who always had pretty beads in her braids, and who would sometimes dance battle the boys, and who rebuffed their romantic attention with such scathing comebacks that she seemed to sit above everyone there, boy or girl, as the queen. She still seemed sweet. She went to Annalise’s school but was so intimidatingly cool and popular that Annalise had nothing to say to her. She sometimes thought about how much fun it would be to sit close together and play with her beads. Annalise always felt so excited by the idea. They would talk about boys, maybe.

“I know what you been doing cuz I read your diary.”

“What?!” Annalise’s shriek resonated through the forest as she struggled to properly sit up and face her sister in indignation.

“You’re moded, I didn’t even know you had a diary!” Cellie said with a boisterous laugh. “Hahaha, oh Jesus. I can’t wait to find it and read it for real.” She put her whole body into the laugh, tottering near the edge of the hammock and causing it to sway.

“I hate you,” Annalise said, holding her arm out to steady her sister and nudge her closer.

 

They came back just before dark like they told Mrs. Harris they would. Theo held a rucksack full of flora and Cellie had a little lizard she had found along the way and was now cradling against her chest like a newborn being burped. All of them were muddy to their ankles and covered in leaves and other forest debris. Annalise expected her mother’s wrath when she got home but Mama opened the door and greeted them like everything was normal, and she knew that their father hadn’t come and Mama was trying to play it cool.

“Don’t you bring that lizard into my house,” was Mama’s only protest, standing to block Celestine’s, and thus all of their, entrance. Annalise watched Celestine gently kneel into the grass so the lizard could scramble from her chest to the ground. Celestine waved goodbye to the little creature. Annalise almost felt bad for her for having to leave her friend behind, as they all came into the house and hugged their mama hello while the crickets began to chirp.

**Author's Note:**

> This story has them a bit younger and in a different location, but is based on ImaginaryRA's prompt:
> 
> Annalise and Celestine have always been competitive with each other. One night they lie on Annalise's bed discussing their big dreams. Some of them were typical teenage goals such as dating Prince and being a dancer for Janet, while others were living a life of a powerful and respected woman.


End file.
